This article uses the Belt and Road Initiative to theorize the relation between intensity and infrastructure. It makes two theoretical claims. First, intensive flows simultaneously reveal and give rise to infrastructural formations. Second, infrastructural formations functionally re-channel the intensities that reveal or give rise to them in the first place. The article introduces the notion of aquatectonics to explore the confluence between intensive flows and infrastructural formations in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative. It argues that an account of this flows–formations nexus is necessary for understanding China’s infrastructural aspirations, while enabling broader, potentially planetary considerations of the ‘old’ intensive roots of putatively ‘new’ infrastructural formations.
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